How to represent different entities that have identical behavior?
- by Dominik
I have several different entities in my domain model (animal species, let's say), which have a few properties each. The entities are readonly (they do not change state during the application lifetime) and they have identical behavior (the differ only by the values of properties).
How to implement such entities in code?
Unsuccessful attempts:
Enums
I tried an enum like this:
enum Animals {
Frog,
Duck,
Otter,
Fish
}
And other pieces of code would switch on the enum. However, this leads to ugly switching code, scattering the logic around and problems with comboboxes. There's no pretty way to list all possible Animals. Serialization works great though.
Subclasses
I also thought about where each animal type is a subclass of a common base abstract class. The implementation of Swim() is the same for all Animals, though, so it makes little sense and serializability is a big issue now. Since we represent an animal type (species, if you will), there should be one instance of the subclass per application, which is hard and weird to maintain when we use serialization.
public abstract class AnimalBase {
string Name { get; set; } // user-readable
double Weight { get; set; }
Habitat Habitat { get; set; }
public void Swim(); { /* swim implementation; the same for all animals but depends uses the value of Weight */ }
}
public class Otter: AnimalBase{
public Otter() {
Name = "Otter";
Weight = 10;
Habitat = "North America";
}
}
// ... and so on
Just plain awful.
Static fields
This blog post gave me and idea for a solution where each option is a statically defined field inside the type, like this:
public class Animal {
public static readonly Animal Otter =
new Animal
{ Name="Otter", Weight = 10, Habitat = "North America"}
// the rest of the animals...
public string Name { get; set; } // user-readable
public double Weight { get; set; }
public Habitat Habitat { get; set; }
public void Swim();
}
That would be great: you can use it like enums (AnimalType = Animal.Otter), you can easily add a static list of all defined animals, you have a sensible place where to implement Swim(). Immutability can be achieved by making property setters protected. There is a major problem, though: it breaks serializability. A serialized Animal would have to save all its properties and upon deserialization it would create a new instance of Animal, which is something I'd like to avoid.
Is there an easy way to make the third attempt work? Any more suggestions for implementing such a model?
